Nigel G. Ward, Javier Vazquez, Emma R. (Danny) Boushka, Oliver Niebuhr
Linguistic Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2026
Abstract: A fundamental goal of speech science is to inventory the meaning-conveying elements of human speech. This article provides evidence for including phonetic reduction in this inventory. Based on analysis of dialog data, we find that phonetic reduction commonly appears with several important pragmatic functions, including the expression of positive assessment, in both American English and Mexican Spanish. For American English, we confirm, in a controlled experiment, that people speaking in a positive tone generally use more reduced forms.
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